In the area of manufacturing turbine blades, usually two-spindle machining is used. This means that a blank is initially subjected to rough pre-machining, subsequently the airfoil region is machined out in detail, then the tip and finally the root are produced. Between these individual machining steps, the workpiece must in each case be rechucked manually or by a robot, because the milling machines are often only capable of carrying out individual machining steps, and in particular because each chucking or mounting of the workpiece only ever allows the machining of a specific region. This type of production is usually referred to as so-called “box production”, since usually a machine is respectively responsible for a certain machining step, and because the workpiece can be temporarily stored in a box after each machining step.
One of the problems with such production is the fact that the speed of such a production line is always determined by the speed of the slowest machining step. In addition, the multiplicity of processes for the transfer of workpieces between the individual units, such as milling machines, measuring station, washing stations, etc., requires complicated devices and leads to considerable time losses in the manufacturing process.
The problem is exacerbated if, for example, in the course of service work performed on a gas turbine or steam turbine, the task is to replace moving or stationary blades that were originally produced elsewhere. The production of such individual pieces, or small batches, for which no corresponding drawings or electronic data are available, is extremely complicated and correspondingly cost-intensive. The old concept of manufacturing service blades on old, usually written-off machines in low-wage countries is no longer appropriate for the market, because the reaction time for an offer is too long, the delivery times, for example for the USA, are much too long (currently 14-18 weeks), it is not ensured that the customer will receive an optimum blade (optimized or checked in its efficiency), and the manufacturing costs are too high on account of the old production technology.